New Theme: Twenty Sixteen

We’re pleased to announce that Twenty Sixteen — the new WordPress default theme designed by Takashi Irie — is available to all WordPress.com sites.

Twenty Sixteen is a fresh take on the traditional blog format, with great features including:

Optional sidebar

Multiple menu positions and a social menu

Overhanging large images

Post intro and pull quotes

Handy customization options let you create your own look. You can choose from several beautiful color schemes or create your own, and further customize by adding your own background or header.

Dark

Gray

Red

Yellow

Twenty Sixteen has many accessibility features and is universally designed for a wide range of WordPress users, whether you’re a first-time blogger or seasoned pro. Since the theme is developed with a mobile-first approach, it will look great no matter what device you’re using to view the site.

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Hi, I think this is a gorgeous theme and the low-key, minimal look looks so on-trend. Something that confuses me is that in the examples of layouts given here, there is clearly a ‘Home’ page. However, when I’ve tried out the theme on one of my sites, the ‘Home’ page doesn’t automatically appear. I realise that this is probably something very basic but could you explain how to achieve the ‘Home’ page as the pictures show? Thanks, and congratulations, again, on a beautiful theme for 2016.

Thanks so much, I’ll have to check it out. Is it free? I’m looking for free versions :). I’ll check your blog out too. The trouble is I’m so afraid to make any changes just in case I lose things along the way. Thanks so much!

Hi. Is this the first theme with post intro and pull quotes? I saw that these features aren’t listed on the sidebar of the theme page, so I’m asking. By the way, these features are awesome and I always missed them. But still, I think Big Brother is prettier and don’t want to change the theme of my blog.

Can’t figure out the header image. The screen says 1200×280, but refuses to allow me to use an image that size without cropping a few hundred pixels off the right end. Tried making the image a few hundred pixels narrower, and it STILL insists on cropping the right end.

Thank you for this theme! I have blogged with the same fixed-width theme (my customized version of the two-column version of Thematic) for nearly 7 years because I haven’t felt like most two-column themes were content-focused enough. This is by far my favorite content-focused two-column official WordPress theme.

Over the past 24 hours I transitioned my blog to this theme, with a few customizations to make it look more like my old theme. After hours of testing, I’m very pleased and I’ll likely be sticking with Twenty Sixteen for many years. But I have a few suggestions for minor changes you might consider for the next iteration:

* Right justification of menu bar doesn’t look great to me on wide screens. Everything else lines up so beautifully, so I think lining up the left side of the menu bar with the left side of the sidebar would complete the look and make this look better. I haven’t yet tried to figure out how to do this myself but suspect it will be complicated due to responsive this-and-that.

* I was very surprised to see a thumbnail and excerpt (extracted from off-page description) inserted at the beginning of a few (but not all) of my posts. It was simple enough to remove by removing two lines of PHP from both content-single.php and content.php. But it would seem like a nice thing to offer as an option on a menu rather than require changes to PHP.

* It took me a surprisingly long time to figure out how to get rid of underlined links in text widgets with css. Turns out that neither text-decoration nor border was making the underline, but something I never heard of called box-shadow. I think a better default in text-widget would be to not underline to be consistent with how you don’t underline links in other widgets such as categories, and the overall uncluttered look.

* I prefer a narrower banner height for my simple branding and was unable to figure out how to adjust it. A couple things I tried with CSS broke the theme, I guess because of all the responsive media query stuff. I’d appreciate if you can give me any hints on how to reduce banner height without breaking things.

Really – these are minor nitpicks, two of which I already figured out how to change to suit my own preferences. But just thought you might want some feedback from someone with a moderately successful blog who jumped right in. I absolutely love this theme and had it been available when I started my blog in 2009, it’s what I would have chosen.

Awesome! I “liked” it earlier. I activated and LOVE it now. I’ve even made it my own through CSS. I look forward to the many new features over the next few weeks. Thanks to the Happiness Engineers for another fantastic theme. Twenty Sixteen is a WINNER! –jaa

That was not true. General setting on my blog lets me turn snow ON and OFF on MY blogs, but there was no general setting on the global dashboard I could find that would let me turn off the snow everywhere. There isn’t even a Settings menu item on the global dashboard.

Please turn the snow off. Right now I leave immediately any site which has it.

I’ve had a lovely time moving across to 2016. I spent the last year on Zuki, which is a riot of colour with all the photographs. I decided I was ready for something simpler.

The move was straight forward. I redid my menus; even added a custom URL menu to my other blog. Cool. I set up some image widgets to be links to categories I want to feature.

The only bit of pedantic tweeking I had to do was reduce the size of the Excerpts on my posts. Now they are short and sharp for 2016’s slugs that sit just below each post’s heading and before the feature image.

The fun part was setting up my first menu pages. There was some trial and error getting the right sizes for photos and headings that would re-size neatly. Thought I had it settled last night, then woke up this morning with a different format in my head that worked better.

Everything was done with the standard features of the new theme. I didn’t need to customise. I’m very happy with the result.

I would like to thank the developers for making another general purpose default WordPress theme, I might not agree with some of the design decisions (I think that there should always be an option to show all the post meta data (date, time-stamps, authors, categories, tags, et cetera) on the front page/home page and on single posts et cetera, I think that a centered title and tagline and menu and site logo et cetera is more general purpose/balanced/flexible, I think that the blog title font and blog tagline font should be a bit bigger and that the post titles/post headings font should be smaller, I think that there should be better and more free color schemes, and a few other things that I can not think of at this time), but I do think that the Twenty Sixteen theme is just good enough to accomplish its role and I am currently using it on my blog and I am liking it so far; and I look forward to the release of the Twenty Seventeen theme next year, and I hope that some of my previous/current/future feedback and previous/current/future bug reports is/are considered again to help with improving previous/current/future themes to be more balanced/flexible/logical/practical/et cetera and less buggy.